LB 875 




.E16 




Copy 1 




] AN ADDRESS 




! . 0N 




j SCHOLARLY WORKERS: THEIR SPIRIT AND METHODS. 


< HY 

HON. JOHN EATON, LL. D., 


. 


U. >S'. Com/mikHion&r of Education. 

{ 




< DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF ROANOKE 


college; 


< SALEM, YA., AT THE AXNFAL COMMENCEMENT, 




< TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 1879. 




i 

!; 

< WASHINGTON, D. «'. 


\ 


IUi>D .V OETWKILFR. l'l.'l NTEI.'S. 




1879. 






i. 




LB 875 
.E16 
Copy 1 



AN ADDRESS 



SCHOLARLY WORKERS: THEIR SPIRIT AND METHODS. 



HON. JOHN EATON, LL. D., 



U. 8. Commissioner of Education. 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF ROANOKE COLLEGE, 
SALEM, VA., AT THE ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT, 



^ 



(/ 



u 



TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 1879. 




WASHINGTON, D. C. 
JUDD & DETWEILER, PRINTERS. 
1879. . 




e> 



SCHOLARLY WORKERS: THEIR SPIRIT AND METHODS. 



Youth is credited with being a period of awkwardness. 
Goldsmith, to whom we are indebted for some of the most 
beautiful passages in the English language, was often em- 
barrassed in finding the right word in conversation ; but, 
more serious than all that appears to the observation of 
others, is that awkwardness which the upright soul feels 
when, in any unfitting or wrong attitude, it approaches 
truth or the responsibilities of life. Life's labyrinth is all 
dark before the youth ; neither its complicated passages nor 
its end are revealed. How shall they find the clew ? To 
aid in this crisis, the home is filled with loving solicitude, 
the school offers its teachers and appliances, the church its 
precepts and sacraments, and the wise of all ages their 
philosophies. 

Coming here to greet the gathered representatives of the 
wisdom and youth of this cherished institution, can I do 
better than invite attention to a discussion of the spirit and 
methods of scholarly workers ? 

Our American civilization is a great stimulus to the as- 
sumption of responsibilities. Its fundamental principles 
force all of us to be workers. Our law recognizes no rights 
of primogeniture. The precepts and practices of our life, 
while they stimulate individuality, tend to make us careless 
of the past and unmindful of the future, and to concentrate 
our thoughts and deeds on the present. We are pronounced 
deficient in the respect for antiquity;' it is declared that the 
families of our great men lose the characteristics that made 
them eminent after the third, the second, or perchance the 
first generation, and it is claimed that the cherishing of more 
inspiring memories and the encouragement of more far 
reaching hopes would afford elements for a better training 



4 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

in the responsibilities of life than is possible under our 
present tendencies. 

Moreover, our youth cannot now retire to a solitude so re- 
mote that they shall be influenced solely by the opinions 
and events of a single community. Their food, their cloth- 
ing, their society, are affected by world wide influences. 
Nothing is really foreign to them. Before them are spread 
the crimes and virtues of the remotest peoples. The most 
distant questions of society, of politics, of science and art, 
of belief and conduct, press upon them for solution. Noth- 
ing before them is apart by itself either for observation or 
contemplation; nothing is simple ; all is complex, vast, in- 
tense, swift. Their voyage of life is not, as was depicted in 
ancient mythology, a middle way between two opposing 
perils, after passing which the course was safe. The mod- 
ern Scylla and Charybdis, the perils and competitions of our 
youth, are found in every opportunity and every responsi- 
bility, great and small. "What fortitude, patience, and self- 
mastery of spirit — what honesty, fidelity and comprehensive- 
ness of method will they need! Already, before the hand 
of the youth directs the rudder alone, unaided and unsup- 
ported, he has encountered, in type or in reality, much of 
the sea and the weather of his future life ; he enters upon 
the responsibilities we here consider with a certain develop- 
ment of his powers. If he has a Byronic nature, it is no 
matter how brilliantly he is endowed ; if he is compelled to 
confess with that misguided poet : " I never was governed 
when I was young," he is likely to enter upon a career de- 
fiant of truth as practised in decent life and taught in the 
precepts of morality. Like the savage, his keenest pursuit, 
his largest development-, his utmost struggles, are not likely 
to be for self-mastery, but to seize or destroy his game or 
his enemy. He is not submissive, he is not humble, he 
cannot therefore expect to enter the temple of truth ; its 
gates are closed to him; its enchanting occupations, its 
beauties and glories and divine inspirations he cannot pene- 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 5 

trate. But if possessed of the willing, cheerful spirit of 
Shakspeare, truth opens to him on every hand and invites 
his approach. He has the key to her richest treasure. To 
him there are sermons in the rudest stones ; to him 

" the meanest flower that blows can give 

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

In nature and art his sympathies are universal : 

" Aloft ascending, and descending down 
To inferior kinds." 

He enters into the conditions and moods of others; he 
bears their joys and sorrows. He knows men "from the 
heart outward, and not from the flesh inward." He pene- 
trates the core, and gets at the essence of men and things ; 
to him the essential and non-essential are. not confused. 
When he encounters the evils that assail him he does not, 
Sampson like, bury himself with them in a common ruin, 
because he has never been blinded by yielding himself to 
the influences of Delilah. May he not be described always 
as Sainte-Beuve described his ideal of a scientist — the soul 
of a sage in the body of an athlete ; he may not have real- 
ized it in himself, but he is aiming at it. With this in view 
his hours are occupied with exercise of mind or body; his 
physical, mental, moral, spiritual habits are formed ; his 
aims are selected, purified and elevated; his opinions are 
considered, cherished, vindicated and practised ; he detects 
and rejects the false, the mean, the wrong, for himself and 
others, with a precision and certainty like that of chemical 
repulsion ; his nature, his principles, his practices are in 
accord with the highest in every condition of life. He 
does not reject the principles of heredity; but memories of 
ancestral inferiority do not degrade him, nor ancestral supe- 
riority infatuate him with foolish pride; he cherishes their 
lessons while he draws, from his responsibilities to posterity, 
influences that impart to him in the midst of the intensest 



6 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

activity something of the sublimity of repose. He accepts 
for himself, whatever his sphere, Milton's dictum that every 
man " ought of himself to be a true poem, that is, a com- 
position and pattern of the best " and most honorable things. 
His spirit is strong enough, and his methods so adapted as 
to overcome his own weaknesses and surrounding difficulties. 
An all-absorbing purpose, reaching to a distant and high 
object of pursuit, finds some way of lifting and drawing 
him towards it, whatever the incidental resistance. Ten 
thousand demands may come upon him ; he may be hourly 
turned aside, still he is accomplishing that great purpose. 
Plutarch describes Julius Csesar as a spare man, of soft 
white skin, distempered in the head and subject to epilepsy, 
yet enduring beyond the wont of the strongest, coarse diet, 
indefatigable journeys, exposures in the field, exhausting 
labors, finding sleep in chariots and litters as he was borne 
along, and employing even his times of rest in the pursuit 
of action. Amanuenses wrote for him as he went from fort 
to fort; his letters were literally dictated from the saddle ; 
here surely was mastery of self and of environment; with 
him difficulties encountered were but spurs to greater effort. 
Each day, nay each hour, marked the purpose not only 
conceived, but executed. With him, to will was to do. 

In striking contrast appears that other class of minds of 
which Coleridge was a representative. Of massive mind, 
possessed of vast and varied intellectual treasures, he was 
forever beginning and never finishing. Of him Charles 
Lamb said : " Poor Col.; but two days before he died he 
wrote to a publisher proposing an epic poem on the wan- 
derings of Cain in twenty-four books. It is said he has left 
behind him more than forty thousand treatises of criticism, 
metaphysics, and divinity, but few of them in a state of com- 
pletion." Southey wrote to Coleridge: "You spawn plans 
like a herring; I only wish as many of the seed were to 
vivify in proportion/' True he had great activity of thought, 
but he had an equally great constitutional indolence. If he 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 7 

had cultivated the spirit and the methods best fitted to pro- 
duce results out of these conditions, he might not always have 
finished his undertakings, but certainly he would have com- 
pleted more than he did, and have made a marvellously dif- 
ferent figure in literature and history. In some individuals 
an embarrassment arises from the apparent separation be- 
tween the subjective and objective. The eyes are open, the 
object is before them, but they have no vision of anything 
external. Thought here obeys two commands : the law of 
association and the law of the will. Under either there may 
come the play of reason, of memory, of imagination and the 
excitation of the sensibilities. The law of association may 
carry the mind on its abstract ethereal track, unaffected by 
any influence through the senses. This abstraction may be 
employed in profound thought, in those processes of deduc- 
tion and induction out of which came the triumphs of a 
Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Kepler, and a Laplace. Or they 
may occupy the mind in useless reverie, in dreams, in sen- 
timentality, such as move the infatuated reader of fiction to 
tears of sympathy and conceptions of the greatest heroism 
without stimulating him to kindly word or deed for the 
relief of suffering, and without creating enough respect for 
himself or others to make him appear in public decently 
attired. True, our highest thoughts never fully grow into 
acts. The greatest genius is more apt to be dissatisfied with 
his attainments than the man who stands at the other end 
of the intellectual scale; and here, therefore, the spirit and 
methods of scholarly workers come to their aid. 

Here they too are met by a favorite fallacy, covered up in 
an important truth ; they are told that the mind must fol- 
low its own bent. While this is in the main true, they 
should not be deceived so far as to follow natural impulse 
to their own destruction. All should aim at completeness 
of nature as well as art by attending duly to that portion 
of the body or that faculty of the mind which is deficient or 
feeble. This is needful not only for the defective part but 



8 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

for the sure health and intelligent activity of the whole 
organism. Young people may be deceived by their own 
judgment as to what is the tendency of their natural parts ; 
when, however, this is accurately determined, they may well 
settle in the main their pursuits in life, but never to the 
total neglect of any thing essential to manhood or woman- 
hood. To mistakes made at this point we may trace many 
failures in life, many imperfect or distorted characters 
which appear to have no place in the economy of society, 
and which everywhere confess themselves out of place ; in 
this opinion all who know them concur. Follow this fallacy, 
let it become a universal rule of action in a republican form 
of government, and we can easily imagine how soon these 
perverted natures, perverted in physique and in mind, may 
become sufficiently numerous to modify unfavorably the 
enactment and administration of law. How long before 
these half-developed souls may be constituted into classes 
and arrayed in deadly feuds against each other? 

Writers on vital statistics tell us that in savage life un- 
tempered exposures destroy the feeble in infancy ; and they 
give this as a reason why we never encounter among bar- 
barians puny and sickly men and women. 

Is it to be true that the haste and multiplicity of affairs 
(which the civilization of our day permits like an avalanche 
to overtake so many when young) are to smite down their 
manhood and their womanhood, so that a gulf, well nigh as 
dark as the river of death, shall set them apart, as an asy- 
lum or prison class, from the possibilities, the hopes, the 
memories, the occupations of those who, in the survival of 
the fittest, as the men and women with healthy minds and 
healthy bodies, enduring, true, noble, pursue the higher life 
that places our age in contrast with all others — settiug them 
in their destitution and criminality apart from the benefac- 
tors of our race who fill our firmament with the primal 
duties that shine aloft like stars and scatter at their feet 
like flowers 

" The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless." 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. V 

As it is the part of civilization to arrest the infant death 
rate of savage life, so it is the part of wisdom for us to 
determine and arrest the causes that increase among us 
these destitute and criminal classes. 

It is the merit of our Christian civilization that its growth 
has an inherent tendency to overcome and render impos- 
sible these evils. Every man must be the architect of his 
own fortune ; he must live honestly with all men, and pro- 
vide for those of his own household. Every man is consti- 
tuted a worker, and, beginning at the beginning, he must 
of necessity be a learner, and in this sense a scholarly 
worker, whether his instrument be the spade, the plow, the 
carpenter's plane, the sword, or the pen. 

The principles we have been discussing are of universal 
application. They embody themselves in the declaration, 
the larger the manhood the better for the man in every 
sphere ; or, as Socrates put it, first the man then the special- 
ist; and, as I have said, a marked quality of our institu- 
tions is their arrangement and tendency to aid every one in 
producing these results. Our theory is that everyone chooses 
for himself. The aim of our Christian institutions is that he 
shall choose the better, that our large liberty shall not work 
out a greater evil but a greater good. True, a man may reject 
this obligation partly or even altogether; no decree of king 
or caste controls him ; he chooses freely until his wrong 
choice leads to that wrong act which society for its self-pro- 
tection selects for punishment Here he encounters in a 
most serious form a lesson on the perversions of character. 
In order that his natural capacity may be aided in these 
choices by the concentration of additional light upon his 
path, the whole people in their capacity as citizens guarantee 
universal instruction. We may observe how this tendency 
of our Christian civilization to aid a man in balancing and 
making the best of every condition, follows him in his du- 
ties and in his misfortunes. 

Perchance he is a husband and father, with a competency, 
2a 



10 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

and is overtaken by misfortunes. Then, this action of the 
whole people through the state conies to his relief; perhaps 
offers first to instruct his children. The eldest child finds 
his way to the free school, and, it may be, onward to the 
free high school, and thence to the free university. The 
second child is perhaps afflicted with blindness ; the State 
offers the school for the blind, and so far restores a balance 
to his capacity that he not only supports himself but 
blesses others. The third child is deaf and dumb ; the 
same is accomplished for him. The fourth and last is an 
imbecile, and the restorative, balancing tendency of our 
Christian civilization is not yet exhausted, but the state 
takes this unfortunate child, repulsive in his want of mind, 
to the school for idiots. Nay, his wife becomes insane, and 
the state affords her an asylum for the rest of her life. 
Nor is this the end ; the father overborne, his efforts para- 
lyzed by the shocks of repeated and inevitable misfortunes, 
dies penniless, and a civil officer gives him honorable burial. 
Nor are these acts of Christian, statesmanlike reason without 
their reward. The children are all saved from pauperism 
and crime, those cankers upon the body politic; all are 
self-supporting. 

Even the idiot, in due time, comes forth from his school 
home, to perform among friends those simple tasks that 
earn him an ample livelihood. The others are good citi- 
zens, thrifty livers, Christian workmen; and the first-born, 
possibly by the greater aid df his collegiate instruction, re- 
turns to the State a hundred fold the expenditures for the 
entire family, by his career of eminent usefulness in some 
one of the skilled industries or the learned professions. 

Society and philosophy sometimes allow these supreme 
tendencies to be overlooked, and the young catch the idea 
that there is no difference between doing well and doing 
ill ; their moral vision is obscured, as was Solomon's when 
he saw the end alike to all. For a moment, or to a limited 
observation, there are present so many instances of wealth 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 11 

and position attained by fraud — the alloy or gilding passing 
for the pure gold, the adulterated for the genuine article, 
the shadow for the substance, the clothes for the man, the 
name for the thing — that in his inexperience he doubts the 
difference. To iucrease his surprise he finds literature, and 
even a pretence of philosophy, inculcating this fallacy. 
Perchance some Hudibras solemnly informs him — 

" He has first matter seen undressed 
And found it naked and alone, 
Before one rag of form was on." 

His confusion is increased by the war of the schools, the 
thunder of their artillery, the gleam of their swords, and 
flash of their musketry. 

Studying the progress of events in the history of nations, 
of individuals, of doctrines, he observes that the growth of 
these evils has been followed by extreme remedies. How 
shall he deal with this incomprehensible past ? Shall he 
attempt to settle all questions for himself? Shall he repeat 
the experiments and errors of the astrologer and alchemist 
before he rejects their follies and accepts the results of sci- 
entific astronom} 7 or chemistry ? Shall a 3-outhful commu- 
nity go through all the forms of institutions and laws that 
have been tried, from the times of the Egyptians down to 
our own modern republic, before adopting a permanent form 
of government ? Rejection of the palpably false or the worn 
out and effete is the only conclusion. Using native good 
sense something must be taken on trust. He must trust his 
own powers within their limits ; on the farm he must trust 
the soil, the seed, the season and methods of labor ; in the 
manufactory, the nature of the wood, the stone, the metal, 
the implements, and processes of change ; in commerce he 
must add trust in the fabricator and the conditions of transit; 
in society and civil affairs he must trust his fellows. Shall 
he pause here, or will he continue in the exercise of the 
same good sense in the higher region of morality and relig- 



12 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

ion ? Shall his faith rise, not contrary to reason, but above 
reason, and accept the divine Creator, benefactor, ruler? 
True, the laws of chemistry and physics, astronomy, geology, 
mathematics, and biology may accompany and confirm him, 
but cannot direct him in this last, highest act of the soul. 
Indeed he has not come up to this high standpoint without 
serious lessons in the exercise of temper, and larger discrim- 
ination in the selection and use of methods. In the physi- 
cal act of going up and down hill he exercises equally the 
powers of reason and will, but each act requires a different 
movement of the muscles. His spirit, his reason, all his 
powers may everywhere Jje brought into requisition, and 
there appear more and more evidences of final accord be- 
tween all facts and all laws that he studies ; but the tests of 
chemistry are not available either in physics or moral affin- 
ity, and he must leave behind the demonstrations of mathe- 
matics when he passes into the region of moral science. 
His theology and geology will be found in accord, though by 
most diverse tests. It may not gratify his conceit or pride 
or vanity that he cannot sucoeed in this high region by the 
methods of any physical science in which he may be expert ; 
that in his moral activities his conclusions must be based 
solely on probabilities, and that for all beyond he must trust 
with the simplicity and humility of a child ; but in all his 
pursuit of art or science he has had experience in discern- 
ing between true and false, and, if honest with himself, he 
has found his powers the more healthful, the more free the 
atmosphere around him is from admixtures of error. Not 
an inconsequential aid has he found daily toil ; again and 
again it has solved problems beyond the reach of his science. 
Cecil said of Sir Walter Raleigh, " I know that he can labor 
terribly.". Thackeray said of Macaulay : " He reads twenty 
books to write a sentence ; he travels a hundred miles to 
make a line of description." Observe how he lays out the 
plan for his history, and then revises and re-revises and di- 
vides the time for the work between reading and travelling, 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 13 

that he may personally know all the books and all the places 
before writing, and then proposes to get off' two pages a day, 
and afterward devote a year to polishing, retouching, and 
printing. He added to all the vast powers with which 
nature had endowed him patient, minute, and persistent dili- 
gence. He answered to Pope's precept that a good writer 
must be a good blotter. Woodrow observes of one of his 
compositions that scarcely five consecutive lines in any one 
of Macaulay's minutes win be found unmarked by blots or 
corrections. Follow him in working up the battle of the 
Boyne, his visits, his notes, actually spending nineteen work- 
ing days over thirty octavo pages and then dissatisfied with 
the result. Fortunate, if this is understood to be the price 
of supremacy in any art. Leonardo da Vinci would walk 
the whole length of Milan that he might improve a single 
tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Napoleon would con- 
sult his army returns in the sleepless hours of night, and 
during the overture of the opera would study problems in 
the movements of his armies. The spirit of toil is their all 
conquering power, while with purity of motive and fidelity 
of method their heads are not troubled with the snakes of 
Orestes or the "bricks" of the American debauchee. No 
duty can call them too quickly, or require them to wait too 
long or sacrifice too much. In £heir relations to others 
they accord the fairness and charity they expect ; their ani- 
mosity, or jealousy, or anger, or other evil passions, if stirred 
within them, are tempered with the thought of their supreme 
obligation to what is right, and the conviction that human 
life is a cooperation, a correlation of forces, in which we all 
serve by turn. We drink a mingled cup, but recognize 
order as the first law of all that is good. 

One plants, another waters. An incident in Newton's 
life fitly illustrates this better spirit and method. His best 
efforts in demonstrating his theory of gravitation, by calcu- 
lating the revolutions of the moon on the basis of the 
earth's radius, as then accepted, were unsuccessful, and he 



14 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

put aside his papers for sixteen years, until, receiving in- 
formation of a French colleague's more accurate measure- 
ment of the earth, he resumed his calculations and success- 
fully verified the result. 

They give light and accept it ; their honor lies not in 
their titles or lack of them, not in the noise, or lack of it, 
that attends their position. ' 

However humble their sphere, they make that daily ad- 
vancement in character and in the condition of their toil 
which affords them the essential joys of triumph. From the 
most indifferent source may come their greatest lesson, their 
highest reward. 

They recall that the royal associate Naaman received 
from the humble Hebrew servant the word that led him to 
the cure of his leprosy. 

Buffon, after long years of the severest study, was led, 
by the inspection of marine yet inland shells which he 
found different from species then known to be inhabiting 
the earth, to that idea of infinite time containing successive 
creations which so extended man's vision and has given re- 
lief to so many scientists. Facts for them require no name 
of renown to command their attention ; but they must be 
facts ; they seek their value whether recognized by fashion 
or not. They understand that nothing is fully known if 
taken in its condition at any given moment ; and they study 
its history, relations, and possibilities. Their methods may 
so accord with the unfolding of principles involved that 
they may forecast the coming event dependent upon them 
as accurately as Burke the French Revolution ; yet they do 
not set themselves up as prophets. However much they have 
attained to, they are in the attitude of the devout , Robin- 
son, expecting " more light and truth yet to break forth." 

Could w r e conceive that the questions over which men 
have contended during the last century of our civilization 
had been submitted to nations and peoples altogether of 
this spirit and these methods — how different would have 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 15 

been the course in human history, even in the most enlight- 
ened nations, such as England, Germany, France, and our 
own country ? How would the resistance to man's mastery 
over the forces of nature — opposition to the progress of 
human institutions in the interests of universal humanity — 
have diminished or entirely vanished ? Conceive the people 
of our own land all characterized by this spirit and these 
methods, how much less of evil, how much more of good 
would they bring out of our problems of labor and capital, 
of finance, debt and credit, coinage, currency; or of ques- 
tions of industry, of adjustment in city or country popula- 
tion? — questions of race, politics, art, science, and religion. 
If we desire these questions treated with more reason and 
less rant, more fairness and less fury, with a fair likelihood 
of just and final settlement, it is a matter of profound 
concern that our people should be scholarly workers, with 
right spirit and methods. The great task of preparation 
must be accomplished during youth or man's formative 
period. The precepts of statesmanship, philanthropy, and 
education recognize this fact. In the wide-spread disposi- 
tion to revise our educational schemes, with a view of 
adapting them to new experiences, we have great need to 
avoid the destruction of good already in our possession; 
but, as a first condition in producing scholarly workers, 
'education must be universal. No single individual must 
escape its influence or its benefits. The progress of the 
whole people in all high attainments in character and in 
life will be determined by the height to which their aver- 
age advancement can be carried. The complication and 
vastness of the questions of our day cannot be successfully 
encountered without a sufficient number of minds devel- 
oped both by the highest general culture and by instruction 
in necessary specialties. The principles which have modi- 
fied instruction in the direction of the so-called learned pro- 
fessions — law, medicine, and theology — must be applied to all 
pursuits, and the science and art of instruction therein ascer- 



16 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

tained and applied. What must be done is not unfittingly 
illustrated by Quintilian's Treatise upon the Education of 
the Orator. The method of training is essentially the same 
for all skilful work, but the materials may differ. We 
have acted upon the supposition that if the mind receives 
proper discipline, adaptation and adjustment will follow 
of themselves. Already the progressive nations of Eu- 
rope have learned that instruction has a part in special 
adjustments as well as in general culture, and schools of 
technology and of trades have multiplied indefinitely. 
Quality, beauty, fabrics, are wholes composed of totally dis- 
similar elements. It is absurd to suppose that the analysis 
of one will impart knowledge of the other. We may well 
give to everyone the utmost manhood, but we need also re- 
member that before a merchant can understand marketable 
fabrics he must understand the raw material of them and 
the processes of its manufacture. Classification and nomen- 
clature are as necessary in his business, and may be as rig- 
idly defined, as in the logician's art, equally complete and 
comprehensive, and, in their measure, elevating for all in- 
dustries and professions. When we consider the aimless, 
vague scholasticism under which we have been training 
workers and turning them out en masse for the thousand 
duties of our complicated life, and recall how often they 
have looked upon their education simply as a trick to en- 
able them to avoid honest labor and live by their wits, w y e 
marvel not that the tramp is abroad in the land, but we 
may well wonder that any other profession is more numer- 
ous. 

Fortunately the movement for modification in education 
is not wholly towards technical excellence ; the best minds 
are concerning themselves with the general subject. In 
place of occasional squibs from literary skirmishers, we 
have knowledge, logic, experience, and eloquence engaged 
in setting it forth in all its bearings. The science of educa- 
tion is being made to agree, not merely as it has in the past, 



ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN EATON. 17 

with the subjective conditions of the human soul as formu- 
lated in literature, but is brought into accord with the 
structural conditions of human society, where facts may be 
observed, recorded, and generalized. The day is passing 
away when it will be believed that the man who has failed 
in everything else will be fit for the teaching of youth ; no 
task requires better nature, larger acquisitions, or deserves 
greater reward ; besides, all pursuits have this added func- 
tion, that they educate so far as they influence others. The 
vastness and responsibilities assumed in collegiate work no 
one pay limit. Every act, be it the choice of a study or 
the selection of an officer, is of consequence. 

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, alumni, officers, and stu- 
dents of Roanoke College, I have discussed here these prin- 
ciples with the more satisfact on, because I believe they 
accord with your own, and are embraced in your aims and 
illustrated in your efforts for the increase of the means and 
the advancement of the work of your college. You are 
erecting new buildings; you have selected as your presi- 
dent a young man. I congratulate the college that its 
guardians have chosen so wisely; him that the duties are so 
honorable, so full of possible good, and that he has been 
thought fit for the head of the college by his own associates, 
its devoted friends. Even in his early manhood I see fitness 
and promise. The college is young and will need all the 
toil which his vigor and strength can command. Moreover, 
I remember that it has been said : 

" In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves 
For a bright manhood, there is no such word 
As— fail. 1 ' 

As an example, an encouragement, he has before him the 
lives of some of our college presidents, whose names are 
most cherished, who began early and labored long, carry- 
ing their institutions through diverse and repeated trials 
with a unity of purpose and effort which had not a little to 



18 ROANOKE COLLEGE. 

do with the continued usefulness of their colleges, and 
which might not have been possible if older men had been 
chosen and frequent changes followed. 

The College, in the period of its history, has already 
accomplished much. It aims at honest, thorough work, 
and at sympathies as broad as the land in which we live, as 
universal as humanity and truth. Situated where 

" Nature's heart 
Beats strong amid the hills," 

here Wordsworth could have fitly said — 

<l How beautiful this dome of sky 
.And the vast hills in fluctuation fixed." 

Here all out-doors oifers itself as a free library to every 
student, and over it we may conceive written, as over the 
library at Thebes, the inscription, " Medicine for the 
soul." 

Here, indeed, are the conditions favorable to health ot 
mind and body. Our superior instruction is greatly imper- 
illed by the increase of expenses. Here life is not cut 
short by the cost of living ; and here, aspiring youth who 
are compelled to unite plain living with high thinking may 
find the culture that too great expenses would forbid them 
elsewhere. In England there is an old college saying, 
" Pray at King's, eat at Trinity, and study at Jesus." 

All needful for the complete development of every man, 
may they be found for the future, as for the past, all united 
in fit harmony at Roanoke ; and that of every student, as he 
goes forth from its halls to the responsibilities of life, it 
may be said, in the words of Goethe — 

" Like as a star, 
That maketh not haste, 
That taketh not rest, 
Be each one fulfilling 
His god-given hest." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 845 580 5 * 




